Pages

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The horror blogging call of duty sounds once again, and
this time it’s a multi-blog event dreamt up and organized by a longtime friend
of this blog, Jonny Dead of Blood Sucking Geek (BSG), titled Ultimate Gore-a-thon:
A Splatterific Extravaganza! I’m thrilled to include At the Mansion of Madness
to this cause along with BSG and seven additional blogs also taking part. The
event will take place over a two week period (February 10-23) and will include
a series of posts covering the blood-and-guts tradition in horror. To check out
the diverse range of what everyone is covering, and what I’ll be writing about,
click Here. The other blogs that are participating in the
Gore-a-thon are as follows:

Sunday, January 20, 2013

I think It’s been too long since I last covered a Paul Naschy movie, and to make up for
this, I’ve chosen to cover one of the best and easiest to recommend, aside from
Horror Rises from the Tomb, that you
Naschy fans out there have no doubt
already seen.

Vengeance of the Zombies
aka La Rebelion de las Muertas is a
huge slice of awesome from Naschy and
director Leon Klimovsky that delivers
a good deal of bloody fun to go with its heavy-handed themes of religion,
betrayal, and vengeance, partly thanks to some extraordinary gore and plenty of
sassy female zombies in see-thru negligees who’ve managed to maintain fabulous
looking hair despite being dead and partially decayed. It’s also a Spanish
horror babe-fest, complete with some of the best from the era: Aurora de Alba (Mark of the Wolfman), Maria
Kosty (A Dragonfly for each Corpse),
my personal favorite from the movie Mirta
Miller (Count Dracula’s Great Love),
and an adorable redhead lead actress that just seems to go by Romy.

This one’s notorious for having an
off-kilter score, by Juan Carlos Calderon,
but I rather like it. I personally don’t think it’s bad; it just has a tone
that some may find mismatching. With the fearsome personality of the picture,
one could say that the upbeat, jazzy score seems intrusive and misplaced at
times, overthrowing suspense and possibly inciting failed restrained laughter
from some of the more uninitiated audience members (as an aside I want to mention that the sounds heard during the morgue scene, as the zombies rise, are some of the most eerie and unnerving I've ever heard and fit in perfectly; listen for it). But this is part of what
makes cult film so fascinating and kitsch. I was initially hooked at the
beginning when a resurrected zombie lady (Norma
Kastel) began running over concrete graves in slow motion. The credits roll
over an up-close shot of this creepy living dead woman walking a fixed distance
from the camera, as dark, reality transcending jazz music can be heard before the movie
transitions into a bright and cheerful day in London with a another hip Jazzy
piece and some embarrassingly catchy “dow-dow-dow” vocals that are a bigger
earworm than Gangnam Style. It’s my kind of way to start a horror film. Totally
off the wall!